“The people who cast the votes decide nothing; the people who count the votes decide everything.”
Variously attributed to Joseph Stalin, Boss Tweed, Napoleon, and others, this quote or some paraphrase of it was undoubtedly said at some point in history by a person wise to the ways of the wily and has been repeated innumerable times since by the cynical and the wary.
Regardless of who said it originally, it’s undeniably true. When it comes to elections, there’s no discounting who does the counting.
Who among us hasn’t seen at least one athletic contest, professional or amateur, in which the referee proved to be the most valuable player? Suffice it to say that, if there are people who will conspire to rig Little League baseball games, there are people who will cheat on local, state, and national elections, whose outcomes are far more consequential.
Covid is a convenient excuse for would-be cheaters in this election year. This virus with a less than half-percent fatality rate is just too dangerous to risk voting in public, we’re told. We must mail ballots to everyone, including all the dead and relocated persons whose names are still on the rolls, and then rely on the notoriously unreliable post office to deliver those ballots to all the real and imaginary voters and then return the completed ones in (extended) time to the vote counters.
Better yet, let’s send out teams of partisans to accost voters and coerce them into filling out ballots under watchful eyes and hand them back to the accosters.
What could go wrong?
Voters in Harris County are finding out now as details of a ballot-harvesting scheme coordinated in part by Joe Biden’s Texas political director, Dallas Jones, come to light.
Could it be that we’re going about this whole thing in the exact wrong way? Maybe we should have more exacting requirements for voting and counting votes, rather than laxer ones. Maybe we should all be more concerned about having fraudulent votes cancel ours out.